"2018.06.30 duet with Jeff Weston - Pittsburgh, PA - in person": Starting on January 1st, 2018, I began making a movie every day of me playing (M)Usic.  The plan was to shoot one every day of 2018 & to string together excerpts from each of them in chronological order to make a feature-length movie to be called "365".  Along the way I decided to compile monthly reports named by month & year, e.g.: "January, 2018", & to release these online a month after they were done.  Hence, "January, 2018" was uploaded on March 1, 2018.  I started thinking about each month more & more thematically.  "May, 2018" became my piano month.  "June, 2018" was my duets month.  It was difficult to find 30 local people willing to play a duet with me to meet my goal of a different duet for every day in June so I contacted people in my international contacts to somehow make a duet together — using Skype or some other means.  We've been playing the duets for as long as they take, spontaneously deciding when they were over, & then I've been excerpting roughly :20 to a minute to use in "June, 2018" & "365".  At 1st, each movie that I made documenting each duet was thought of as little more than raw footage but, gradually, they started seeming like significant works in & of themselves.  SO, after I'd edited the footage I shot with Michael Pestal via FaceTime, I decided to declare each movie to stand on its own & to break my pattern of waiting a month to post the monthly footage to post one of these daily duets every other day starting on June 16th, until mid-August when all of them would be uploaded.  This 30th duet features Jeff Weston on contrabass.  I don't know much about Jeff.  He contacted me once by email asking me if I knew a carpenter who could construct a box for him that he was planning to use in a thesis performance or some such.  That seemed interesting.  I heard him improvise as part of a Crucible Sound.  As it turned out, our duet together was extremely pleasing to me.  He was quiet to the point of being inaudible at times but that wasn't bad because his relation to the contrabass was like a dance of hands.  I has only played guitar once before in this series of June duets when I played with Jason Belcher.  Unfortunately, I hadn't videoed my playing so I decided to play guitar again this time.  After all, guitar has been one of my main instruments.  I had it rigged so that the electric guitar would trigger samples of me playing guitar.  I also used various props that I'd developed mainly for my "Exorcizing Capos" performance ( https://youtu.be/nTRdh4YnA2I ).  These included 2 specially made mutant capos.  I look forward to more playing with Jeff as one of the open-minded classically trained musicians of Pittsburgh.  On a different note, I often explain to people that I'm not a musician, that I'm a Usician, a Low Classicist, a booed usician, a Sound Thinker, etc.  People often seem to agree that I'm not a musician because they hate the way I play so much & hate the way I break all sorts of unwritten laws about what makes 'good music'.  In other words, they don't understand that I'm trying to make a point that I'm thinking about context & creatively exploring it.  - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE note written on August 12, 2018E.V. 

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